Only a few days ago, I had a spat with my mother because she thinks I don’t get outdoors enough anymore, that I spend all my time — or at least too much of my time — sitting at the computer. She may or may not be correct about that — and yes, I know how ridiculous it is that my mommy is still telling me to go outside and play at the age of 40 — but either way, I can relate to this cartoon by Dave Coverly:

See more of Coverly’s work here, if this sort of thing pushes your snicker-button. My thanks to Sullivan for posting this first.

You know James Dyson, the British guy who was so concerned about standard vacuums “losing suction” that he invented his own super-high-tech model with no bags or filters, which creates a hurricane-force vortex inside a stylish yellow chassis by tapping the hellish power of a tiny black hole? Well, okay, his vacuums aren’t really powered by black holes — damn it all, that would be cool! — but you know the guy, right? It seems that Jaquandor isn’t impressed with his latest venture, a bladeless room fan that costs $300:

Seriously, if he’s that big a techno genius, he needs to use his abilities for stuff that’s actually, you know, important. … This guy is like a supergenius with OCD who has decided to use his abilities to rid the world of all of his personal little pet peeves rather than advancing our world toward its ultimate goal of unlimited energy, flying cars and jetpacks, spaceships coming and going all over the place to our colonies throughout the solar system, and a Super Mario game that doesn’t make me feel stupid. We don’t need bladeless fans! Ye Gods, man! Let go of your anal retention and use your powers for good!

I myself have no ill will toward Mr. Dyson, even though I think anyone who’s willing to lay out 300 clams for a fan obviously makes too much money, but I can’t help but admire any rant that builds toward the expression “Ye Gods.” Oh, and the stuff about flying cars and spaceships to the colony worlds is good, too…

Scene from the park-and-ride lot at the train station this morning: a pretty but heavyset early-twenty-something woman, whose obvious black dye-job and purple eye shadow fairly screams “I shop at Hot Topic,” is sitting in her car. Her door is open, and one leg is extended outside, her shiny-black, patent-leather, stiletto-heeled shoe resting flat on the asphalt. It looks like she’s wearing lavender tights under her black jeans. She is seemingly spellbound by whatever she’s listening to on the stereo. It’s not music; it’s a male voice speaking. I’m thinking she doesn’t seem to be the NPR type, so an audiobook, perhaps. As I get closer, I pick up the speaker’s rhythm and enough individual words to confirm my theory. Definitely a story being told, definitely an audiobook.

Then I hear two words in particular: “Bella” and “Edward.”

Of course. I can’t help but snicker.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ve probably figured out that I’m not exactly a “glass is half-full” kind of guy. I don’t consider myself overly negative or pessimistic (although I’ve certainly been accused of both by friends and family), but I do have a painful awareness of the worst-case scenario, if that makes sense.

That’s why I find the late Christopher Reeve so endlessly fascinating and, to employ the shopworn cliche, inspirational. He was a guy who ended up in the worst imaginable worst-case scenario, and yet somehow, he endured. No, that’s not quite correct; he rose above it. Not only did the accident that paralyzed him fail to destroy him, it actually made him a better human being. And his accomplishments after the accident were at least as impressive and important as the ones he’d achieved before it.

Consider the following list, taken from an article about Bret Michaels and other celebrities who set examples of courage and dignity in the face of potentially devastating health problems:

In his “Still Me” memoir, the cinema “Superman” recounted his rehabilitation, admitting that initially, he considered suicide because he thought his life was over. However, he:

• wrote two best-sellers,
• directed two telefilms,
• produced and starred in a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,”
• received multiple Emmy nominations for his acting and directing work,
• traveled across the United States giving speeches,
• established the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation to speed spinal cord injury research and aid sufferers,
• co-founded the Reeve-Irvine Research Center,
• was instrumental in pioneering a new form of therapy that has accounted for a number of paralyzed patients becoming able to walk again,
• made the cover of Time,
• won a Grammy,
• and shattered ratings records for CW series when he guest starred on “Smallville.”

I’m not ever going to become a Pollyanna who always looks on the bright side of life. That’s just not me. And frankly I despise that simplistic aphorism about what you should do when life hands you lemons, because oftentimes those lemons are too small and hard to squeeze enough juice out of them to make any damn lemonade. But this list definitely suggests that you can find some use for the little buggers. Even if it’s just turning throwing them back at the smug jackass who gave them to you in the first place…

Jaquandor pointed me last night at a nifty tool that helps you visualize the scale of the Deepwater Horizon disaster by overlaying a satellite image of the oil slick on top of the landscape of your choosing. This is what resulted when I entered Salt Lake City as ground zero:

For my non-local readers who don’t know the geography of this area, the big blue splotch in the upper left is the Great Salt Lake; the smaller blue splotch to the south, the one that’s mostly covered by the oil slick, is Utah Lake. In between those two lakes is the most densely populated area in the state, what we locals refer to as the Wasatch Front. As you can see, the oil would cover most of that area — two valleys, two counties, two major cities and all the ‘burbs in between. It looks like the city of Ogden to the north might be spared, but it’d have oil lapping at its borders. And the slick has intruded into the Tooele Valley to the west, and that long eastward-bound pseudopod has taken out Park City, home of the 2002 Winter Olympics, and crossed the border into Wyoming. In other words, this damn thing is big. Mind-boggingly big.

Keep in mind that the image of the oil spill was taken May 6, four days ago; it has surely grown since then. How can we possibly fix something like that?

So what the heck is going on down there in the Gulf of Mexico, anyhow? How can a fire on a big steel platform that’s standing above the water lead to an oil leak of apocalyptic proportions under the water?

If you, too, have been asking these timely questions, check out this handy video that explains such mysteries in only about one minute:

Well, I thought that was pretty interesting. I guess I imagined the oil was leaking directly from the wellhead, and never considered the associated piping, which of course makes for a much bigger problem.

One interesting sidenote: that video came from Al Jazeera, the Middle Eastern news network. It seems they have an English-language division, which I did not know. I’m learning all sorts of things today. My thanks to Sullivan for posting the video and sending me down that particular rabbit hole.

Getting back to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, if you’re interested in some numbers, check out this chart at Information is Beautiful. Among other fascinating — if deeply sobering — factoids: The spill already covers an area roughly the size of Jamaica, and we may have less than 30 years of easily obtainable oil remaining to us. I don’t know about you, but I don’t relish the idea of adopting a Mad Max-style existence for my 70th birthday.

One final link: For a peek into the bowels of hell itself, here’s a gallery of incredible photos showing the final hours of the Deepwater Horizon’s fight for existence. I have to confess a perverse attraction to disasters like this. I imagine watching that thing heel over and fall into the sea would’ve been an awesome — in the original, non-1980s sense of the word — spectacle…

Before I could fix a nice brunch for The Girlfriend yesterday morning, I had to make a quick run to the store for a couple of items. Grocery shopping early Sunday morning is always an interesting experience. There’s not much life yet — most people are home cooking breakfast for their own loved ones, or else in church, I guess — but the life you do encounter seems to embody so much despair, longing, resignation, and, sometimes, outright agony. It’s a peek into the torments of the suburban damned, I tell you. In just eight short minutes, I saw:

• A young single father with a four- or five-year-old child in his cart, probably on a weekend visitation, standing in the cereal aisle as if paralyzed by the vast range of possibilities, torn between visions of being the cool dad who gets the kid the cereal that turns the milk purple and contains a nifty prize, and the responsible dad who makes the child eat something that’s good for him. Or at least something that won’t cause the boy’s mother to throw another hissy fit and emasculate him in front of her parents yet again, as she’s done nearly every week since that disastrous prom night when she promised him everything would be all right because you can’t get pregnant on the first time.
• A visibly hungover guy, ashen-skinned behind very large, very dark sunglasses, pondering the selection of refrigerated fruit juices, wondering which would be least likely to make want to vomit again. Or would at least provide the least offensive visual effect when he inevitably went down on his knees before the Porcelain God for the sixth time in the past eight hours.
• A Latina woman with a cart completely filled with family-size bags of tortilla chips, on sale this week for the incredible price of $1.29 a bag. She knows she’s surrendering another little piece of her heritage to the behemoth consumerism that defines modern America, and she feels a minor pang of guilt at the way so many of her family’s traditions have already been cast onto the rubbish heap, but damn, that’s such a bargain! And anyway, who wants to spend all day bent over a hot oven, making tortillas and cutting them into quarters for baking?
• And finally, the grim-faced woman with the too-orange tan, the too-pale hair that comes from a bottle, the fine lines around her eyes that no amount of Oil of Olay seems to fill in, and last night’s sweat-stained blouse and nylons with a run in them, doing the Walk of Shame after waking up in a dilapidated single-wide with a paunchy guy who’d looked much better the night before. A fresh pack of smokes won’t make her 19 again, but she hopes it’ll at least take the stale tequila taste out of her mouth.

And just so you get the full effect, all this human drama was set to the tune of Fleetwood Mac’s “Sara,” as wistful and mournful as adult contempo shopping music has to offer.

Of course, my interpretation of things may have had something to do with being hungry and not having had any coffee yet. I tend to see things through a glass darkly in my pre-caffeinated state. But you have to admit that that state tends to produce better stories…

Aside from one intensely unhappy week back around 1995 or thereabouts, I have proudly worn a full beard for two decades now. That’s not an easy thing when you live in a community that places a high value on conformity, and where the local ideal of how a respectable male is supposed to look hasn’t changed significantly since the Eisenhower Administration.
I’ve had girls tell me they wouldn’t go out with me because I have a beard.

I once had an interviewer ask me to shave it off in exchange for a minimum-wage job working essentially alone in a warehouse, where nobody would ever see me. I’ve had other interviewers who haven’t said a word, but who’ve visibly lost interest in me as soon as they got a good look at my face. On one memorable occasion, I was told not to even bother filling out an application until I came back “presentable.” (I told that doughy-faced spud-nugget what he could do with his discriminatory and frankly chickenshit application process.)

And I’ve put up with sidelong glances and silent disapproval from countless fellow Utahns, who can’t say why, exactly, but just know that there’s something wrong with men who have beards.

The irony, of course, is that many of this state’s founders were impressively bearded themselves. No less a figure than Brigham Young sported a mustache-less Quaker-style beard in his latter days (forgive me, I couldn’t resist). Presidents of the Mormon Church Lorenzo Snow and Joseph F. Smith — not to be confused with his uncle, the Joseph Smith who founded the Church — were both approaching ZZ Top territory with their lengthy neckwarmers. And Brother Brigham’s righthand man, the infamous gunfighter Porter Rockwell, would’ve fit right in with the Allman Brothers Band. But I guess that kind of glorious hirsuteness went out with polygamy and the coming of statehood.

If I sound bitter, well, it’s sometimes hard not to be. After all, I’m a nice guy, and I’ve always kept my facial fuzz neat and clean. My beard is a symbol of my individuality and masculinity, and also kind of a family tradition to boot — my father has worn a beard most of my life, as did my uncle Louie, the one who died from ALS. And damn it, I just like how I look with it better than the way I do without it.

I’ve long comforted myself by rationalizing that the rampant beardism I so often encounter is just a parochial Utah thing, that things are surely different out there beyond the Zion Curtain. And you know what? I was right:

A recent study in the Journal of Marketing Communications found that men with beards were deemed more credible than those who were clean-shaven. … The researchers say the implications of their findings could extend far beyond advertisements. For instance, male politicians might want to consider not shaving because the “presence of a beard on the face of candidates could boost their charisma, reliability, and above all their expertise as perceived by voters, with positive effects on voting intention.”

More credible? Charisma, reliability, and expertise? Now that’s more like it! But perhaps you’re not yet convinced. In that case, consider this chart:

You’ll have to click on it to blow it up large enough to read; be prepared to scroll, it’s pretty big. And after you’ve clicked and pondered, then tell me you don’t have a new-found respect for my beard. Go on, just tell me. Because charts prove everything, right?

I thought this was funny, if somewhat uncomfortably close to the mark for those who were quite convinced they were going to lead extraordinary lives when they grew up and are recently feeling more and more disappointed in themselves. Not that I would have any idea what that’s like, of course…

Source, via.

I planned to write yesterday evening about the gorgeous weather we’re having this week, and the pleasant lunchtime walk I took and the nostalgic mood it engendered… you know, my usual sentimental drivel. But then the earthquake struck.
No, I’m not kidding.

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